In this two-part special report, The Journal News/lohud looks at how things went wrong on Metro-North in the years before a series of accidents killed four passengers and two railroad workers and the continuing struggle to bring the commuter rail back. These stories are based on a review of hundreds of pages of federal reports and depositions generated by the accidents, interviews with current and former Metro-North officials and labor representatives, federal regulators and railroad industry experts.

Today’s report focuses on a railroad whose thinking about the balance between safety and on-time performance pivoted quickly after Hudson Line train 8808 flew off the rails on Dec. 1, 2013.

Thirty-five years ago, Metro-North took over an ailing commuter line from Conrail, inheriting a rusting railroad where track was crumbling, trains were often late and crowded when they were on time, and worker morale reflected the neglect around them.

From those early struggles rose a commuter rail that became the envy of the industry, recognized by peers with awards for engineering and design.

Ridership more than doubled as trains that once headed north empty stopped to pick up passengers on their way to jobs in the Westchester County suburbs, the reverse commute. Weekend trains were added to ferry car-less millennials into the city.

By 2012, Metro-North had surpassed the Long Island Rail Road as the nation’s busiest commuter rail. Ridership stood at 82 million and on-time performance surged into the high 90’s.

And then, somehow, Metro-North lost its way.

CLOSE

Nancy Montgomery of Cold Spring remembers her husband Jim Lovell and talks why she continues to seek answers from the MTA.
Seth Harrison/Lohud

During a 10-month span in 2013 and 2014, a series of derailments and miscues led to the deaths of four passengers and two railroad workers.

Dozens more were left with life-changing injuries, among them a former Metro-North air conditioning mechanic paralyzed after he was thrown through a speeding Hudson Line train that went off the rails near the Spuyten Duyvil station on Dec. 1, 2013 when its engineer fell asleep at the controls.

Signs of potential trouble were either missed or ignored as a consuming preoccupation with growing ridership and the only metric that mattered — on-time performance — took hold.

Eight years before the Spuyten Duyvil derailment an engineer was disciplined for flying through the same curve over the speed limit, prompting the railroad’s chief engineer to urge his bosses to install a system that would automatically put the brakes on speeding trains. His plea went nowhere.

And three weeks before a New Haven Line train went down track that was supposed to be off-limits on May 28, 2013, killing a track foreman, rail traffic controllers had made the same blunder, mistakenly sending a train through an area where there were workers. A track crew stood watching while the train sped past them.

And more than a month before a New Haven line train rode over a broken rail joint in Bridgeport and derailed on May 17, 2013, hitting an oncoming train, rail inspectors found broken joint bars in the same location. Seventy-six were injured.

Track workers said they didn't have enough time to maintain rail because bosses didn't want to slow down trains and disrupt on-time performance.

“There seemed to be an obsession at Metro-North with on-time performance — so much so that Metro-North management came to believe that on-time performance could be an effective metric of the health of the system,” Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in 2014.

Federal investigators quickly figured out what went wrong. In most cases, human error, coupled with the absence of a backup system when human beings fell short, was to blame.

But a months-long investigation by The Journal News/lohud has shown that underlying each mishap was a hidebound railroad culture, more than three decades in the making, that held tightly to outdated ideas for running a commuter rail efficiently, thinking that in hindsight proved to be off the mark.

Before the Spuyten Duvyil derailment, Metro-North believed that an alert engineer — not technology — was its best defense against derailments.

And after the Bridgeport derailment, the MTA discovered Metro-North wasn't using track geometry vehicles, which use laser and optical sensors to spot troubles like broken rail joints.

“How can the second or largest railroad in the country not have a track geometry car when New York City Transit has four or five and Long Island’s got one or two?” Tom Prendergast, the former MTA chairman and CEO, told federal safety investigators in 2014. “I just don’t know. And then when I ask questions it’s like, you know we didn’t feel we needed them.”

Prendergast summed up the problems at Metro-North with a sports analogy:

“If you’ve got a great sports franchise and nobody ever challenges you, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when the caliber of that team comes down. So this organization was literally best in class for years. I wouldn’t say running away from everybody but running ahead of everybody. … I would never say lazy. I would never say borderline complacent. It’s just they didn’t push themselves, OK?”

Today, on-time performance for the 700 trains Metro-North runs every day has dipped to percentages in the low 90s as maintenance of track neglected for decades continues. Complaints about overcrowded trains grow louder by the day and fares keep increasing. At least two more fare hikes of about 4 percent each are scheduled for 2019 and 2021, part of the every-other-year increases that began in 2009.

The Metro-North story is one that has been revisited again and again, as each new derailment, each new collision — in places like Chatsworth, Calif., Philadelphia and, most recently, DuPont, Wash. — highlights safety lapses at railroads across the USA.

Metro-North says it has renewed its focus on safety over the past four years.

“Concern for safety has influenced every decision we make, and have made in recent years,” Metro-North spokesman Aaron Donovan said. “Our focus on safety was the impetus behind our implementation of automatic speed enforcement at curves and bridges, the enhanced employee protection system, adoption of the confidential close-call reporting system, systemwide roll-out of alerters, sleep apnea screening, safety stand-downs, and more.”

A railroad crew removes the last car from the scene of the fatal Metro-North train derailment in December 2013.

(Photo: File photo by Ricky Flores/The Journal News)

COSTLY MISTAKES

Chapter 1

The fix took just a few days.

On Dec. 6, 2013, five days after Hudson Line train 8808 went off the rails in the Bronx, the Federal Railroad Administration issued Emergency Order 29.

It called on Metro-North to improve safety on the commuter rail by, among other things, adapting its signal system to slow speeding trains when they came through a sharp curve approaching the Spuyten Duyvil station.

From then on, if engineers did not respond to speed-restriction signals transmitted from the rails to their cab, the brakes would automatically be applied.

In the months to come, Metro-North would add automatic train control technology to four other curves along its 775 miles of track — in Yonkers, White Plains, Port Chester and Bridgeport. Prior to that, such a system existed only to prevent train-to-train collisions.

The technology is a sort of preliminary version of positive train control, which is designed to slow down speeding trains across an entire railroad system.

Metro North Railroad engineer William Rockefeller is wheeled on a stretcher Dec. 1, 2013, after the commuter train he was driving derailed in the Bronx.(Photo: Robert Stolarik/AP)

It was not in place when engineer William Rockefeller, on an early Sunday morning run from Poughkeepsie, fell asleep and sped through the Spuyten Duyvil curve at 82 mph, more than 50 mph over the speed limit.

Metro-North officials could not say how much the signal fix at Spuyten Duvyil cost. But in court papers filed this month, Metro-North lawyers pegged at $1.1 million the total cost of the cleanup and reconstruction after the derailment. More than $800,000 of that went to labor costs.

The failure to make the fix sooner would cost Metro-North much more.

Property damage alone was pegged at $9 million. Payouts to settle lawsuits filed by the injured and the families of those who died stands at more than $32 million and the final tab isn’t in yet.

The railroad faces a $10 million federal lawsuit by Rockefeller, who claims the railroad’s failure to add the braking technology is to blame for the derailment. Rockefeller was suffering from an undiagnosed case of obstructive sleep apnea.

He also claims that the railroad should have installed an alerter system in his cab that delivers audible and visual signals to an engineer when a train is speeding. For southbound runs to Grand Central Terminal, the alerter system was in the rear engineer's cab. Rockefeller was riding in the front cab.

RAILROAD IGNORED CONCERNS

Chapter 2

Joseph Riley was just a few months into a new job overseeing the railroad’s engineers when he got word that a Metro-North train had crashed into another in Mount Vernon.

It was April 6, 1988.

The aftermath of the April 6, 1988 Metro-North crash in Mount Vernon, which killed engineer Raymond Hunter. The photo was taken by a Metro-North engineer at the scene.(Photo: Photo courtesy Joseph D. Riley)

A train heading north from Grand Central Terminal on its way to Connecticut plowed into a train ahead.

Neither was carrying passengers. Raymond Hunter, the 42-year-old engineer piloting the northbound train, was killed. Both trains were demolished.

“If there were passengers on that train, it would have been a catastrophe of unmeasured proportions,” said Riley. “We were just lucky that day.”

At the time, Metro-North had technology that would alert engineers to the presence of a train ahead by sending a signal into the train’s cab. But an investigation found that Hunter had not activated the system after leaving Grand Central, Riley said.

Riley went to Hunter’s funeral a few days after the crash and vowed he’d never attend another.

“That was a defining moment for me,” Riley said. “The lesson was this isn’t going to happen during my tenure. I made a commitment to rail safety that I was able to keep…We never had another one of those ones where you had to go up to the door and tell somebody their husband or son is dead."

After Hunter’s death, Riley and his team of four would regularly spend their days out on the rails, radar guns in hand, trying to catch engineers speeding.

Out along the Port Chester curve, he would make sure engineers saw him in his full reflective vest and hardhat, holding his radar gun aloft.

Engineers would slow their trains only to discover later that Riley didn’t have batteries in his radar gun.

“A mile further west was the radar,” Riley recalled. “They went by me and they thought they were through radar and then they went around the curve where we had the live radar. It was a dirty trick but it worked.”

Federal safety investigators say that in the years leading up to the 2013 derailment, Metro-North had only done one radar check of a train piloted by Rockefeller.

After the derailment, the NTSB analyzed recorder data from dozens of Hudson Line trips along the same route Rockefeller took and discovered 28 instances where engineers were going 5 mph over the speed limit and two when they were more than 10 mph over the limit.

Keeping a close watch on speeding prevents railroads from tight scheduling, which can lead engineers to go too fast, the NTSB noted.

In October 2005, engineer Angela Manley-Harris was caught speeding through the Spuyten Duyvil curve, after passengers told Metro-North that their train nearly came off the rails.

The incident prompted Riley to approach George Walker, then Metro-North’s superintendent of operations, and recommend the railroad install a system to brake trains along the Spuyten Duyvil curve — the same one installed in the days after the Rockefeller derailment, Riley says.

Riley says Walker turned him down because the adaptation would interfere with on-time performance.

A southbound Metro-North train rounds a bend at Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx as it approaches the Metro-North station Nov. 25, 2017. Four years ago, a southbound train derailed coming around the same bend, killing four passengers. The train that derailed was traveling at over 80 mph when it left the tracks, far faster than it should have been travelling.

(Photo: Seth Harrison/The Journal News)

'SAFETY COMPROMISED'

Chapter 3

“I don’t care what they say, safety was always compromised for on-time performance,” said Anthony Bottalico, a retired conductor and veteran of 39 years who headed Metro-North’s biggest union, the Association of Commuter Rail Employees at the time of the accidents. “Unfortunately, mid-level managers were under pressure. It goes to the core of what’s wrong with the railroad industry.”

A veteran engineer, Riley retired from Metro-North in 2008 and went to work as a railroad safety specialist for the Federal Railroad Administration. He retired from the FRA last month.

Schanoes says he backed Riley’s effort to deploy the technology.

But he was still convinced the railroad’s best defense was an alert engineer. Tens of thousands of trains traveled the same route as Rockefeller without a mishap, he notes.

“What happens when all your systems fail, then what do you do?,” said Schanoes, who is retired from Metro-North and is working as a railroad industry consultant. “There had been 300,000 trains go through there before.”

In June 2009, nine were killed when a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Metrorail train crashed into the rear of another train in Washington, D.C. -- a crash experts say highlighted the danger of over-reliance on technology. The NTSB said the accident was caused by a malfunction in Metrorail’s automatic train control system that failed to detect the train ahead.

“I didn’t think it was a fatal compromise by Metro-North,” Schanoes said of the railroad’s decision not to go along with Riley’s recommendation. “I firmly believed that the engineer was the best protection we had.”

Schanoes’ thinking changed since the Spuyten Duyvil accident.

“Now you say to yourself, 'Should I put a control signal code in for a 1-in-300,000 chance?' And the answer is 'Yes,' ” he said.

The human toll aside, a cost-benefit analysis would argue in favor of the fix, Schanoes said.

“You really have to include the real costs and not eliminate or disregard those costs that are covered by insurance and may not, because of insurance, flow directly to the bottom line,” he said.

Joseph Riley, former Metro-North road foreman who in 2005 urged bosses to install a braking system along the Spuyten Duyvil curve when an engineer nearly derailed her train, talks about train safety at the Poughkeepsie Train Station Dec. 23, 2017. (Photo: Frank Becerra Jr./Poughkeepsie Journal)

Schanoes and Riley, along with Walker, have each been questioned by Rockefeller's attorneys in pre-trial depositions for the federal lawsuit. Walker could not be reached for comment.

Steve Ditymeyer gets Schanoes’ thinking. Ditmeyer headed the FRA’s Office and Research and Development from 1995 to 2003.

He’s become an advocate for positive train control, technology designed to prevent derailments and collisions, which some in the railroad industry fear would take control away from engineers.

Ditmeyer argues that PTC will over time become a handy tool for train crews, supplementing their railroad instincts with real-time information delivered by GPS about what's happening on track around them.

“Railroaders are interesting people,” says Ditmeyer. “They do care about their jobs and they want to do them well. It’s a long, long tradition. Some operating managers believe that attitude and discipline of the train crews is all that is needed to have safe train operations."

Editor's note: This report does not focus on the Valhalla crash of February 2015, where a northbound train plowed into an SUV that had stopped on the tracks of a grade crossing, because the NTSB investigation pinned much of the blame on the SUV driver. Six people were killed.